Shakespeare, Sensation, and Renaissance Existentialism

Some time during the early seventeenth century in Cambridge, the learned divine John Preston was part of a debate before King James I on the topic of whether a dog could perform a syllogism. The debate, which had been arranged by the onetime demonologist Samuel Harsnett, was a forthright success, in part because James liked his hunting dogs very much, and Preston managed to make a good case for their considerable cognitive powers. Participants were asked to explain a simple scenario: A dog arrives at a three-way fork in the road while chasing a hare. Faced with a decision, the dog sniffs one path, pauses, and then immediately begins chasing down the third. Preston's argument, which delighted James, was that the dog performs the following syllogism: the hare must have gone one way or another (major premise); it didn't go down this path (minor premise, sniffed at the tip of the nose); it must have gone this way (conclusion).

The event is described in Daniel Heller-Roazen's powerful book The Inner Touch (2007), which traces Stoic and Aristotelian ideas about the so-called common sense from late antiquity to the present.¹ The common sense, according to this pair of traditions woven into the Renaissance, is unique in that it not only gathers information from the other five senses, but engages in the further reflexive operation of sensing that the individual is sensing. What is interesting about the common sense, then, is that it doesn't just sense a what, it senses that. According to a passage from Aristotle's De anima, the common sense works through a kind of touch: like flesh that registers an outside pressure as a palpable compression within, the common sense acquires objects from the organs of vision, sight, smell, touch, and hearing and then registers the fact of its own alteration by these objects. As an avenue of sensing sensed, this remarkable faculty explains how creatures who lack intellective souls—creatures like dogs, but also infants—can nevertheless acquire an appreciation for their own natures and environment. For if the dog is to chase the hare successfully down the right pathway, it must be able to sense that it is not smelling the hare. All living creatures who experience sensation, humans included, must thus possess this capacity for self-sensation—what Montaigne, in the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," calls the inner touch or "l'interne attouchement." In its noncognitive power to sense both the presence and absence of sensation, the inner touch introduces the possibility that our felt experience of things in the world is also a feeling for the fact that we exist.

What does the haptic or palpative tradition gestured at here—one that is the subject of recent discussions by Heller-Roazen, Judith Butler, and Giorgio Agamben—have to tell us about the theater and, in particular, Shakespearean theater? One could proceed contextually in search of an answer. The body's reflexive capacity for self-sensation is discussed by a number of early modern writers: Montaigne was aware of it via the Stoics, Robert Burton describes it in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and there is a long-standing tradition of commentaries on De anima that lay out the sensitive soul's powers in impressive analytic detail. (Preston drew on these traditions in the debate at Cambridge.) One might argue, then, that early modern theater in general, and Shakespearean drama in particular, was in a position to express something like a philosophical position on the reflexive power of sense, either through direct citation or allegorical exposition. While such avenues of direct expression are certainly possible— Measure for Measure, for example, is full of Stoic arguments about the inevitability of death, when sensation ceases—it is more interesting, I think, to look at how the action and built environment of plays provide an immanent analysis of concepts that would elsewhere be the subject of learned debates. Theater as lived inquiry or parcel of vernacular intellectual culture is perhaps a better way of conceptualizing philosophy on stage, as I will try to show with a few examples.

We begin...